You can have the whole course in your head — the examples, the exact turn of phrase, the moment the penny is meant to drop — and still have no way to get it out into the world. For a long time, the thing standing between an instructional designer and a finished course wasn’t talent or ideas — it was a subscription. This is the story of building a free eLearning authoring tool with an AI in the loop, and why the door it opens matters far more than the tool itself.
Everyone who makes things has a folder on their computer with all their creative ambitions and ideas waiting to come to life. I’m extremely guilty of this — unfinished articles, unedited photographs, half-edited videos, and my most prolific project graveyard… songs.
To add to the mess, when I was working as a teacher I began to develop plenty of ideas for learning courses. I could sit with a problem and see the learning path through it — what to cut, what to put first, where a learner would trip, the one example that would make the whole thing click. This problem-solving process is a creative act in exactly the same way that writing a song is a creative act. When it’s complete, the whole point of the thing is that you share it with someone. I can play the song live, and I can teach the course in a classroom — but wouldn’t it be nice if I could record my music and distribute it globally? Wouldn’t it be nice to provide access to my learning courses globally?
The problem is, when I went looking for the process that would let me do that, I found it behind a door with a price on it. A four-figure-a-year price. For one person, teaching themselves a new craft in the evenings, that isn’t a purchase — that’s a bloody mortgage payment for software you’re not even sure you can use yet.
So the folder continued to collect course ideas that could sit alongside my unfinished songs. The barrier to entry was successful.
The song you can’t release
Let me be precise about the barrier, because it’s easy to point at the wrong thing.
The barrier was never the ideas. Teachers have the ideas. Trainers, coaches, the brilliant subject expert two desks over who explains things better than any course you’ve ever taken — they all have the ideas. The barrier was never the craft, either; that you can learn, and half of it people already have from teaching a room full of tired teenagers on a wet Tuesday.
The barrier was the studio — and, more precisely, the release. The bit that takes what you can already do — the writing, the sequencing, the clever little interaction that makes someone think rather than nod — and turns it into something you can actually get to more than a classroom of people.
For nearly everything else in the mystery ‘ideas’ folder on the computer, the world sorted the release problem out. You can put music on Spotify or YouTube for free. You can post your photographs and your sketches to social media. You can even teach for nothing — upload a video, or just shout from your balcony! One craft after another had its gate quietly lifted: creation was democratised, and so was distribution.
Then there’s eLearning. Try to get a proper course — tracked, assessed, the full experience — out to other people for free, and you hit a wall the other crafts tore down years ago. Your options were two. Use a platform that hosts it for you, but ties you inside its walls and takes a cut of anything you earn. Or buy your own authoring tool and keep control — for which the going rate, per seat, sits in the four-figures-a-year range. These are genuinely good tools — Articulate’s Storyline and Rise, Adobe Captivate, Lectora — and that price is aimed, quite reasonably, at professionals with an employer’s budget. But for a classroom teacher who’s merely curious about scaled digital learning, four figures a year isn’t something you try on a whim. It’s something you talk yourself out of.
Which means the person it prices out is the exact person we should most want in: the teacher wondering whether instructional design might be their second act, the freelancer with no company card, the domain expert who’d make superb learning if the cost of trying weren’t a month’s rent.
There was a free option, and I want to be fair to it because it’s a lovely bit of kit. H5P is open source, gives you dozens of interactive content types, and drops neatly into a lot of learning management systems. If the paid suites are the pro studio, H5P is the free four-track recorder your mate doesn’t need anymore — brilliant for laying down an idea. But it was built to make interactive content, not to close the loop. Getting solid, consistent data back out — the “did it work, and for whom?” — is where it strains: its richer tracking leans on you wiring up a separate learning record store, not every content type reports, and scores don’t flow to your platform unless you go and switch it on. To continue the music analogy, H5P lets you lay down the track. Mastering it and getting it onto the shelf, so other people can reliably play it, is another matter.
So that’s the state of the industry. Releasing a course — by which I mean consistently, measurably, to anyone — cost a fortune. That’s not a talent problem. That’s an access problem. And access problems have a habit of quietly deciding who gets to become what, and I don’t like that much.
Who gets to make the record?
Here’s the question underneath all of this, and it’s bigger than eLearning: who gets to build the thing?
The cost of the equipment has historically always been a barrier to entry… until it isn’t. Photography was gatekept by the darkroom, then by the price of a decent camera — until the phone in your pocket became good enough that a kid could shoot something beautiful for nothing. Music was gatekept by the studio, until a cheap laptop and a copy of GarageBand meant a teenager in a bedroom could make a record that charted.
The barriers always come down the same way: the tools get cheap, and the crowd rushes in. It’s not because the crowd suddenly becomes talented (the talent was always there hiding in billions of computer folders around the world!), but because the price of trying falls to something a normal person can afford. The result isn’t only more stuff (though it certainly is that too), it’s people discovering they can do a thing they’d never have found out they were good at, because the cost of finding out used to be prohibitive.
Learning design has been waiting for its GarageBand moment. And although that’s an exaggerated claim, it’s what I’m trying to achieve here with my open-source learning design platform.
The studio moved into the laptop
I am not a software engineer. I want to be completely clear about that, because it’s the whole point. I’m a learning designer who can write a bit of code in the same way I can cook a bit — enough to feed myself and impress my [more polite] friends, but not enough to run a restaurant.
And yet I built Folio: a proper eLearning authoring tool. It runs on your own machine, builds a course out of blocks, and exports a standards-compliant package that any mainstream learning management system can play and, crucially, report on — completion, scores, time spent on each question, the lot. I didn’t do that by finally learning to be an engineer. I did it by describing what I wanted, in plain English, to an AI, and then doing the part that was actually mine: the judgement, the design.
A couple of years ago, Andrej Karpathy — one of the more sober voices in AI — put it in a line that’s become iconic: the hottest new programming language is English. More recently he gave the working style a name, “vibe coding”, and the term spread far enough that Collins made it their word of the year for 2025. Strip away the hype and there’s a real shift underneath: for a growing class of software, you no longer need the formal language to instruct the machine. You need to know what you want, and you need to be able to tell whether what came back is any good.
That second half is the bit that matters. Building Folio with an AI was not magic, and it was absolutely not effortless. The pattern looked like this: I set the direction and brought the domain knowledge — what a course is, what data a learning management system needs, what makes an assessment fair. The AI did the building, the boilerplate, the first drafts. And then everything — everything — got checked, because the single most dangerous sentence in this entire way of working is “it ran without errors.” “It ran without errors” is not the same as “it worked.” A thing can run perfectly and do the wrong job with total confidence. Catching that is judgement, and judgement was still mine.
So the AI didn’t replace the craft. It removed the drag — the setup, the plumbing, the fiddly export formats, the first ugly draft of everything — so that far more of my time went to the decisions that actually needed a learning designer. That’s the democratisation that interests me. Not “the machine does it for you.” More like: the machine does the studio engineering, so you can focus on getting the music right.
Why not just use the preset drum machine?
A fair challenge: authoring tools already exist, so why build another? Why not just pick up Rise and go?
Because I kept hitting the edges, and the edges taught me something.
Rise is excellent at what it’s for. It’s the slick preset drum machine of eLearning: pick a groove, drop in your content, and you get a clean, responsive course in an afternoon. For a great many jobs that’s exactly right, and I still use it daily. But the presets are the positive and the negative. You get to change the theme colour and the header image; you don’t get to change the whole kit. When I wanted a specific interaction the templates didn’t offer, or full control of how the course carried a brand, or — the one that really stung — proper data from more than one quiz in a course, I was politely shown the wall.
I didn’t want a bigger drum machine. I wanted a studio — somewhere the constraints came from good design and the medium, not from what the template would allow.
What Folio actually is (and what it deliberately isn’t)
So here’s what I made, and the two ways you can use it, because the second one is what excites me the most.
The first way: use it as it comes. Folio is a ready-to-go authoring tool. You build a course as lessons of blocks — text, images, video, knowledge checks, a few richer interactions — preview it exactly as a learner will see it, and export a package your learning management system can run and track. It’s free, it’s open source under an MIT licence, and it runs locally, so nothing you make leaves your machine. Open the page and start.
The second way: use it as a starting point and customise like crazy. Because Folio reads a plain, simple text format — Markdown — a whole course is just a text file. That sounds like a technical footnote, but it is quietly the most liberating thing about it. Here’s the trick that makes it genuinely effortless: Folio ships with a short brief that explains its format. You paste that brief into any AI, tell it what you want your course to cover, and it hands you back a correctly-formatted text file you import in one step — then refine with a designer’s eye. The AI does the formatting donkey-work; you never have to learn the syntax yourself. It means the writing, the reviewing, and the building stop being three separate jobs in three separate apps (no block-by-block copy-paste, which was killing my productivity in Rise). And because the whole thing is open, if you can code, or you fancy learning with an AI beside you, you can take the framework and extend it — add the interaction you wish existed, bend it to your world. It’s a solution and a platform to build on. Ready to play, or ready to rebuild.
Remember, even though AI is involved, Folio absolutely does not do your thinking. It closes the packaging gap — the record, the release, the “any venue can play this and tell me how it went”. What it very deliberately hands straight back to you is the part that was always the real work: the song.
Because here’s the thing about a studio. Once recording is free, the difference between a track that moves someone and a track that doesn’t has nothing to do with the studio. It’s the writing. It’s the arrangement. It’s taste. In our world, that’s the clever, plain-spoken explanation that finally makes a hard idea land; the assessment that tests whether someone can actually do the thing rather than recite it; the video that’s genuinely worth watching; the scenario that lets a learner feel a consequence safely. That’s the seasoned instructional design, and no tool — free or four-figure — supplies it.
Let me make that concrete, because I promised a studio and I should show you inside it. Say you’re a teacher trainer, and you want to build a short course on giving good feedback — something you know cold from a decade of doing it. An afternoon with Folio might go like this. You paste in Folio’s format brief to your AI of choice and spend twenty minutes telling an AI what you want — the objective, the three things people get wrong, the tone — and it hands you back a first-draft course as a properly-formatted text file. You import it to Folio in one click. And now the real work starts, which is the good work: you rewrite the flabby AI phrasing into something with a pulse, you bin the recall question and replace it with a short scenario where the learner has to choose how to open a hard conversation, you drop in a two-minute video of you actually doing it, you add some Actionable Experience Survey questions (my other hobby-horse — I’ve written about the method and why I built a tool for it) so the feedback you get back is worth having. Then you export, upload it to a learning management system, and — this is the part that used to cost a fortune — you can see how it went. The loop closes. On a budget of… nothing!
Are you sure that the democratisation of eLearning is a good thing?
There’s a critique to my plan here — if you make the tools free, don’t you just get an ocean of terrible courses? More clicky-clicky-next rubbish, now at scale, now written by a robot?
Well, yes, probably. Every democratised medium went through its flood of rubbish. Cheap cameras gave us a billion bad holiday photos; they also gave us photographers who’d never have picked up a camera otherwise. The flood is real, and it is the price of the gate coming down. But notice what the flood isn’t: it isn’t evidence that access was a mistake. It’s evidence that access worked, and that the next scarce thing isn’t the tool — it’s the judgement to use it well.
That’s the line I’d underline for anyone nervous about where this goes. Democratisation lowers the cost of entry. It does not lower the value of expertise — if anything it raises it, because when everyone can press record, taste becomes the whole game. Access is not the same as ability. But access is how you find out whether you have the ability, and then how you build it. The teacher who imports their first rough course and feels the itch to make it better — that itch is the beginning of a designer. They just needed to get in the room.
So no, I don’t think a free studio makes everyone a great learning designer, any more than GarageBand made everyone a great producer. What it does is stop the equipment being the thing that decides. It moves the bottleneck from your wallet to your work, which is precisely where a bottleneck ought to be.
Where else the door is opening
None of this is really about eLearning, which is why I think it’s worth your time even if you’ll never build a course in your life.
The pattern — a craft gated by the cost of its tools, then thrown open when the tools got cheap — is playing out across nearly everything right now, and AI is the crowbar. It’s in software, obviously, where people who can’t formally code are shipping small, useful, personal tools. It’s creeping into data analysis, design, film, research — anywhere the “packaging” layer used to demand either money or a specialist you had to become or hire. Each time, the same two things happen at once: a flood of the mediocre, and a quiet rush of people discovering an ability they’d have died never knowing they had.
If you lead a team, there’s a version of this for you too. The most valuable thing you can do in the next couple of years probably isn’t buying everyone a licence for the expensive thing. It’s asking which of your people have the biggest folder of ideas on their computer — a process they could turn into a tool, an idea they could turn into a thing — and whether the only reason it’s still in the ‘ideas’ folder is that the studio used to cost too much. Because that reason has expired.
What Folio is for, and where it’s going
Firstly, Folio is for other people. I wanted to democratise eLearning development — to make it something a curious person can pick up and play with, an accessible extra in the toolbox when someone becomes curious about scaled digital learning, without betting a month’s rent to find out whether they even like it. And for designers already in the field, I wanted a platform to build on: something open enough to inspire your own customisations, your own tools, your own idea of what an authoring studio should be.
Secondly — and this reason is purely selfish — I was tired of the limits of the software I was using, and I wanted a studio that did what I told it to, rather than the other way round.
I should point out that Folio is in version one. I’ll be using Folio in my own work over the coming months and improving it as I go, so if you’d like to follow where it goes — and get the proper technical write-up when it lands — that’s your cue to subscribe.
And I’d genuinely like your help shaping it. If you use it and something’s missing, drop a comment: tell me what you’d build, and let’s see if we can make it happen. Or, better still, take the code, build the thing yourself, and share it back. That’s rather the whole point.
The studio’s open, and it’s free — so let’s make something.
A note on tooling, because the lesson shouldn’t hang on my tool. Folio is one free option among a growing few; H5P is another well-loved open one, and if you’ve an employer’s budget, Articulate’s Rise and Storyline, Adobe Captivate, and Lectora are the polished paid studios and earn their keep. The point isn’t “use mine”. The point is that I’m providing an option to those who don’t want to invest. The tool is the studio; the song is still yours. Folio is free and open-source: try it at andyrogers.design/tools/folio, or take the code from GitHub and make it your own.
Sources and further reading
· Karpathy, A. (2023, X/Twitter). “The hottest new programming language is English.” And (2025) the post widely credited with coining vibe coding. Overview and dating: Wikipedia, “Vibe coding”.
· Vibe coding named Collins English Dictionary Word of the Year, 2025.
· Raval, S. (2026). The Vibe Coding Playbook: Building Your Tech Business with AI. (On building real things with AI-assisted development.)
· Unqork. Code No More: The Power of Visual Programming. (The no-code / “who gets to build” case.)
· McDonald, J. K., & West, R. E. (2021). Design for Learning: Principles, Processes, and Praxis (open access) — for the craft that no tool supplies.
· H5P documentation on tracking and LRS integration, for the “measure” limitations described: help.h5p.com.